Local teen sings heart out for peace

Darby Lee, Peace through music

On what has been the best day of her life so far, Darby Lee had a throat infection. She was also about to have a bad case of the hives, thanks to an allergic reaction to the medication she was taking for the throat infection.

But none of that mattered, because on this day last February, the San Diego High School student was in a recording studio with the friends she loved, singing a song she wrote from the heart. The song was a peace anthem called “Change,” and it has lived up to its name in ways even its eternally optimistic songwriter could not have dreamed up.

“There was just this nice blissful feeling in the room,” Darby, 17, said of the day she and some like-minded classmates recorded the song. “It was that feeling where you know that this is your family and these are the people you can grow with and make a difference with. Everything felt like it was destiny.”

One year later, it still feels pretty momentous. The song Darby wrote and then performed with fellow students Monserrat Lopez and Drew Garner became a YouTube video that has been shared on peace-related websites, including the United Nations’ International Day of Peace site.

Between its buoyant message about being yourself (“No need to rearrange, the change starts with you”) and a crazily catchy chorus about changing the world with “Just a little strength/Just a little faith,” this homemade gem of a song inspired the creation of two on-campus peace clubs. It also inspired Darby and her friends to write more anthems, some of which were turned into videos shot by the students themselves.

And just last week, Darby, a junior at San Diego High’s School of International Studies, was invited to be a youth representative on the U.N. International Day of Peace Music Peace Team subcommittee. This local teen will help shape a global event, a bit of news that is so fresh and unexpected, she doesn’t even know what to make of it yet.

“I’m just so excited,” she said. “It’s the same feeling that I get when I’m about to perform. It’s the idea that you can be this little person, but you can have a big voice. That’s a crazy thought, but it’s possible.”

The youngest of four, the San Diego-born, Clairemont-raised Darby started playing the guitar during a fourth-grade music class at the Longfellow Spanish Immersion Magnet School. She took to it the way she takes to a lot of things (quickly and with great enthusiasm), and soon she was writing her own songs. They weren’t great songs, necessarily, but they were a great personal outlet that turned out to have universal applications.

“Whenever I have internal conflicts that I don’t want to tell someone about, I write a song. There has never been a moment when a song hasn’t helped,” Darby said during an on-campus interview. “I have seen so many people fall apart at the hands of hatred and at the hands of being scared to be their true selves, and when I see that their puzzle can be put back together with a song or a poem or an essay, that really stands out for me.”